Is Bad Posture Causing Your Pain?

There’s nothing worse than having to sit at your desk all day with a discomfort in your back.

 Desk raisers, posture supports, chair cushions, lower back braces… you’ve tried them all and yet your back pain is still persisting!

 Do you find yourself asking if your ‘bad posture’ is the reason behind your pain?

 It depends what you call bad posture.

Below you’ll see two photos of two very common desk postures

 Most people immediately look at posture B and call it a ‘bad posture’ and it often gets the blame for pains such as lower back pain, neck pain and shoulder pain.

 At Fixit we have a slightly different opinion on your desk posture. 

Firstly, we think its important to note that there is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ posture - what is important is making sure we can move between postures as needed throughout the day.

At Fixit we believe that the most optimal posture for our bodies to be in is the one where our muscles are most relaxed - this is the most energy efficient place to be.

Posture A is many back pain suffers go-to when it comes to posture.

It’s a common belief that keeping our backs upright to stop our spine from bending is the best thing for our pain. In reality, when we sit bolt upright like this, our back extensors (the muscles that hold us upright) are like clenched fists - constantly being asked to hold tension.

All we are doing when we sit like this is adding more load onto an already overloaded muscle group and as a result pain signals are given out.

 Posture B on the other hand, shows a posture which many back pain sufferers are nervous to go into. In this posture our back muscles are in a lengthened position and naturally more relaxed.

The reason why Posture B may cause you some initial discomfort is because our nervous system has logged this movement as a threat and therefore is highly sensitive to this movement. 

So what can we do about this?

We must teach our lower backs to get into this lengthened position more often to try and overcome this nervous system response by using breathing techniques

 Try our exercise called “Seated Relaxation” - this is a great exercise for getting length into the muscles of both the lower and upper back so that you can finally relax into a comfortable seated posture.

 Another thing we would recommend all our back pain patients that have a desk job is to practice our relaxed sitting every time you go to sit at the desk.